ParaView 3.6.2 Now Available

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Lab are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.6.2. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. ParaView 3.6.2 contains the following new features and improvements:

The Python interface has been revamped, an exciting new extension to the Paraview Python interface is Python trace. The goal of trace is to generate human readable, not overly verbose, Python scripts that mimic a user’s actions in the GUI. See the “Python Trace” article on page 6 of the October 2009 Kitware Source for more details.

ParaView 3.6.2 includes a collection of statistics algorithms. You can compute descriptive statistics (mean, variance, min, max, skewness, kurtosis), compute contingency tables, perform k-means analysis, examine correlations between arrays, and perform principal component analysis on arrays. More information about these filters is available on the ParaView Wiki.

ParaView 3.6.2 includes the VisTrails Provenance Explorer Plug-in in Windows and Linux packages. VisTrails is an open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system developed at the University of Utah that provides support for data exploration and visualization. The VisTrails Plug-in brings provenance tracking and many of the benefits of provenance to ParaView users. It automatically and transparently tracks the steps a user followed to create a visualization. In contrast to the traditional undo/redo stack, which is cleared whenever new actions are performed, the plug-in captures the complete exploration trail as a user explores different parameters and visualization techniques. A tree-based view of the history of actions allows a user to return to a previous version in an intuitive way, undo bad changes, compare different visualizations, and be reminded of the actions that led to a particular result. Also, there is no limit on the number of operations that can be undone, no matter how far back in the history of the visualization they are, and the history is persistent across sessions. The VisTrails plugin can save all of the information needed to restore any state of the visualization in .vt files, which can be reloaded across ParaView sessions and shared among collaborators. This also allows multiple visualizations to be shared with a single file.

LANL’s cosmo plug-in is now distributed with ParaView 3.6.2. This plug-in allows ParaView to read and process *.cosmo format files, in which particles are described by mass, velocity and identification tags. These particles typically represent stellar masses. The halo finder filter is a friend-of-a-friend particle clustering algorithm. It creates groups containing particles that satisfy a tolerance/threshold linking distance criterion. The cosmology data format, halo finding algorithm, and related (experimental) filter implementations are made possible by the LANL cosmology researchers, the LANL visualization team, and international collaborators.

Mac application bundle and comand line tools are now built as universal binaries (PPC and Intel i386). This simplifies managing ParaView on Mac as now there is only a single binary to download for any architecture.

As always, we rely on your feedback to improve ParaView. We are experimenting with a new user-feedback mechanism. Please use http://paraview.uservoice.com/ or click on the “Tell us what you think” link of www.paraview.org to leave your feedback and vote for new features.